Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d2-FDPMZRc The Renaissance did not, strictly speaking, occur in China. Yet it seems that the Middle Kingdom did have its Renaissance men, so to speak, and in much earlier times at that. We find one such illustrious figure in the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yKT7H_KJ0 Un Chien Andalou means “an Andalusian dog,” though the much-studied 1929 short film of that title contains no dogs at all, from Andalusia or anywhere else. In fact, it alludes to a Spanish expression about how the howling of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIaESzQ1X9w In 2004, the Brazilian musician Seu Jorge recorded a series of Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs for Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The next year, he released a full album of 13 Bowie classics,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrVcDxSpwGM Buckminster Fuller was, in many ways, a twenty-first century man: an achievement in itself, considering he was born in the nineteenth century and died in the twentieth. In fact, it may actually count as his defining achievement. For all...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc5GpBU0kTI ?si=4AEj95O5wdpShG3I FYI: Sesame Street has released on YouTube more than 140 full episodes from past seasons. On the Sesame Street Classics channel, you’ll find some iconic episodes, starting with the very first 1969 broadcast. Watch it above. Also on...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFhKB5zHWFg Though it’s easily forgotten in our age of air travel and instantaneous global communication, many a great city is located where it is because of a river. That holds true everywhere from London to Buenos Aires to Tokyo to...
The story, the many stories, of Miles Davis as an opening act for several rock bands in the 1970s makes for fascinating reading. Before he blew the Grateful Dead’s minds as their opening act at the Fillmore West in April...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcHJvtRK2uY When Netflix launched around the turn of the millennium, it was received as a godsend by many American cinephiles, especially those who lived nowhere near diversely programmed revival houses or well-curated video stores. A quarter-century later, it’s safe to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrbwvG0XeUQ I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. — Winston Churchill Winston Churchill had a reputation as a brilliant statesman and a prodigious drinker. The former prime minister imbibed throughout the day, every...
